German technology website Heise.de reports that SGI will completely abandon its MIPS processor architecture, including its operating system Irix, in favour of Linux-powered Itanium workstations. SGI used MIPS and Irix in its products for almost 20 years, and with this switch to Intel, yet another major (historically speaking, that is) company abandons its architecture for the more common Intel one.

1. SCO own SVR4. That's a well-known fact, and is the basis of their IBM/Linux and Novell lawsuits. That Solaris is based on SVR4 is also a well-known fact - many in the UNIX industry were rather pissed off at Sun and AT&T at the time and formed a (now-moribund) organisation to produce a rival UNIX, OSF/1. When other companies then aligned themselves with AT&T and Sun, this once again divided the UNIX market into two camps. These facts can be verified at Wikipedia, among other places.

2. SVR4 is based on SVR3 (AT&T UNIX) with features from BSD.

3. It might be true that Sun paid money to whomever was the UNIX owner at the time to do whatever they wanted with Solaris. If so, that begs the question why they had to release it piecemeal to make sure they weren't contravening licence agreements.

4. It's well known that SCO's beef is with the GPL and the fact that Linux on x86 has wiped out its UNIX profits. (The old SCO used to be the big UNIX vendor in terms of numbers, because its UNIX ran on x86.) It's also well-known that SCO for a long time, and possibly even now, distributes code under the "unconstitutional" GPL licence.

3. It might be true that Sun paid money to whomever was the UNIX owner at the time to do whatever they wanted with Solaris. If so, that begs the question why they had to release it piecemeal to make sure they weren't contravening licence agreements.

Probably because many codes are not part of SVR4 that purchase covers.

It is not a well known fact that SCO owns SVR4. 95% of the royalties still go to Novell, Novell can over-rule any changes SCO wishes to make to licensing terms and the APA explicitly excluded all copyrights and patents from the transfer. Hell, SCO still needs Novell's permission to even sign up new licensees, which is the basis of Novell's counterclaims against SCO. According to the text of the APA, Novell can direct SCO to make any changes to license agreements that Novell wants to, without getting any permission from SCO, and take these actions on their own if SCO doesn't listen.

Judge Kimball said it is unclear if SCO got ownership of any "Intellectual Property" whatsoever in the APA. The fact that it is unclear to a judge means that it is not a "well known fact" that SCO owns SysV. At best, it means it is uncertain. At worst, it means SCO are liars.

3. It might be true that Sun paid money to whomever was the UNIX owner at the time to do whatever they wanted with Solaris. If so, that begs the question why they had to release it piecemeal to make sure they weren't contravening licence agreements.

At that time, AT&T still owned the license to System V. Sun and AT&T crosslicensed, and SVR4/Solaris were developed concurrently. Sun saw it, among other things, as a chance to 'rationalize' the gap between BSD-ish unix and AT&T-ish unix. The big-bag-of-money that Scott is speaking of is the licensing fee, and at that time AT&T did want a very big bag for the license.